Xcel's Wind Project (Not) for The Birds

Xcel recently announced it was scrubbing plans for a $400 million Merricourt wind farm in North Dakota which has almost optimal conditions in the frequency, duration and strength of high winds. The issue turned on the dangers to migrating whooping cranes and a charming bird named the piping plover. Of course, there is some level of risk for these species: the cranes because their populations are near endangered levels, and the plovers because of their small size and large migratory squadrons. Xcel realized that no one had a good remediation scheme, and without it, they couldn't know the level of cost risk that they would be exposed to in order to meet their increasingly uneconomic mandate of 30% of electricity generated from renewables by 2020. If a project by a motivated utility in the optimum location is scrubbed what does that suggest for the absurd notion of huge, offshore wind farms off Nantucket? As an energy class, wind is a "clean" energy source for campaign speeches, but it's an improbable choice for leading us to "energy independence." MIT has a long-standing Energy Initiative Project that has done the kind of work that industry and policy makers need to think about. Their recommendations for working on the next generation nuclear power plants has sat in the file cabinets since 2003. Indian Point, Fukushima and other plants around the world are older designs, and MIT's scientists argue that a truly carbon-free source like nuclear needs to be considered through the lens of the best designs, construction materials, safeguards, and risk management. They also note that conservation is the great, relatively low cost energy source, which has long been persuasively argued in the "stabilization wedge" methodology by Princeton University researchers. MIT scientists did a heat scan of the Boston skyline to visually display the heat losses through the skins of their most famous towers. The shots looked like scans of the coronary arteries of a triple bypass patient--not good. They argue that putting money into the least efficient buildings would yield the best returns, and shave the Boston utility's peak loads substantially. Not glamorous, like wind turbines, but definitely more realistic, economic, and meaningful.